Dr. Dean Lomax

part of the spine yeah yeah so that's a vertebra part of the spine of the Rutland Sea Dragon so this is pretty much complete ichthyosaur so I'd led the excavation in 21 summer 21 and this is found from the tip of the snout to the end of the tail most complete skeleton of a prehistoric reptile ever found in the UK so how big was this monster?

about 10 metres long so about as long as a school bus

Yeah, pretty intact.

Yeah.

So the guy who originally found it, he didn't know what he'd found.

Cheers, Jack.

So he didn't know what he'd found.

He just spotted a couple of bones.

And the guy who was with him, he said, oh, no, that's nothing.

That's just an old pipe.

And he's like, no, no, I think it's something.

Anyway, it turns out it was bloody something.

It was amazing, like spectacularly preserved, pretty much everything intact.

So you imagine this big skull, which was nearly two meters long, and then it was all the spine, including, say, nearly 200 plus vertebrae, right down to kind of like penny-sized vertebrae at the end of the tail.

Spectacular find.

The guy who found that originally, by finding it, does he have a claim on it?

So he found it on land owned by a water company, and they look after what's called the Rutland Water Nature Reserve.

So by default, it's owned by that institution, and then it would be kind of owned by the council because the key thing is then in order for us to study it and everything, it has to be kind of placed into a museum as well.

So how come you're allowed a part of it?

Oh, they just don't know.